Professor Descends to the Ocean’s Lowest Point: Here’s what He Saw

By Yehudit Garmaise

While many Americans venture out in the summertime to explore national monuments, such as Mount Rushmore or the Grand Canyon, Professor Jim Kitchen descended in a submarine to explore the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean.

Because the ocean floor is just so difficult to reach, said Kitchen, only 30 adventurers have descended to the ocean’s lowest point.

In July, Kitchen set off from Guam, the American territory that lay east of China, in a boat full of scientists who were mapping the sea floor.

Kitchen pointed out, “70% of our Earth is ocean and so little of it has been mapped or explored.” 

Once Kitchen’s boat sailed 226 miles from the island of Guam, the scientists released Kitchen and his submarine pilot Jim McDonald into the ocean. 

The submarine dropped seven miles below sea level. 

In the darkest depths of the ocean, Kitchen and his submarine pilot Jim McDonald saw the tectonic plates that collide to build mountains and slide apart to open up oceans.

Earth is the only of the eight planets in our solar system to host plate tectonics, which slide, shuffle, and crash into each other to create the planet’s terrain and regulate the planet’s temperature.

Once Kitchen and McDonald found the deepest spot of the ocean: called the Challenger Deep, they “saw the Pacific Tectonic Plate actually going under the Philippine Plate,” Kitchen wrote in Newsweek. “We were actually witnessing where two major plates are colliding and all of the resulting rubble from that process.”

Among the incredible sea life that Kitchen and McDonald saw from the light of their submarines were amphipods that Kitchen called “fantastic, transparent little shrimp.” 

“The amphipods have no light, they're in almost freezing temperatures, there's no oxygen, and there's crushing pressure, but these creatures thrive down there,” Kitchen pointed out.

In their two-and-half-hour plunge in a pressurized cabin, Kitchen and McDonald also saw sea cucumbers, “that looked like transparent, floating blobs of mucus that look like alien lifeforms.”

Floating bacterial mats, which are gold sheets that stretch three-square meters were the most mind-boggling thing Kitchen said he saw from the light of his submarine.

“It was like being on a Mars rover,” which is a vehicle that travels the surface of the red planet.

“If life exists on Jupiter's moons or other planets, my guess is that it's likely going to be like what we saw in the Mariana Trench.”

Photo: Wikipedia